Trying to find the most logical way into Iain M. Banks‘ sprawling Culture series, but been turned off by the abstracted Use of Weapons, the obfuscated Inversions, or even his somewhat flawed first Culture novel Consider Phlebas? Look no further. The Player of Games is probably the best book for you.

One of Banks’ tightest Culture novels, The Player of Games represents the British author writing science fiction at his most accessible. As with the other books in the series, one of the book’s main functions is to display the vivid complexity and richness of human ideas that The Culture itself represents. In many ways, Banks’ Culture novels are a guiding post to what humanity could become; an urbane future, galactic society with powerful ethics, powerful technology, and an even more powerful love for all things pleasurable.

But where many of Banks’ other Culture novels feature several complex post-human protagonists and jump between their vastly differing points of view, The Player of Games features just one. This structure — and the fact that that protagonist eschews much of The Culture’s more exotic mores, and is thus much closer in outlook to today’s reader — makes the book much more highly accessible and a tightly woven read.

That protagonist is Jernau Morat Gurgeh. Gurgeh is typical of many Culture citizens; he lives on one of its massive, constructed ring-planets (dubbed Orbitals), he has its post-human genetics, with an ability to internally create and digest any known drug, and he also has the Culture’s penchant for enjoying every pleasure known to the galaxy, with gusto.

With one difference.

Gurgeh is one of the Culture’s most famous and skilled game players. That is, he excels at any game of diversion that involves intellectual stimulation. Modern examples might be chess or checkers — but in the Culture, games have evolved to somewhat of an art form, with some taking days to complete. And Gurgeh is an acknowledged master of them all.

As many artists at the pinnacle of their profession do, however, Gurgeh has gotten bored. He can easily beat all but the most skilled professional opponents. There are still challenges to accept, but few give him any sense of real competition. And it’s this dissatisfaction with his main occupation that appears to be poisoning everything else the master game player participates in.

Thus, when a set of unusual events occurs that leads him into contact with an unstable drone (the Culture’s extremely intelligent and quirky brand of robots) and eventually, into a jaunt to an alien space empire with the Culture’s Special Circumstances branch — its complex combination of espionage and early stage intervention forces — it doesn’t appear that Gurgeh’s too unhappy to sign on for a tour of duty.

Especially when the Culture needs him to participate in what may be the most complex game ever invented by a humanoid life form; a game which shapes its entire society and has life or death outcomes.

From here on out The Players of Games is vintage Culture. Banks uses the lens of an alien civilisation to display his primary vision of humanity to great effect; its decadence, its tolerance, its advanced systems of ethics and thought and its technology in action.

But the book is also much more than that.

It’s the story of an artist who has been protected for his entire life; allowed to pursue his passion without compromise; sheltered from all forms of violence and able to reach fulfilment, suddenly thrust into a world which is much more brutal, emotional, turbulent, and even vicious.

And it’s about how all of that impacts on him.

The striking thing about the subject matter of the book is how Gurgeh reacts to events. The Culture’s view on violence, even sexualised violence, and the less civilised galactic civilisations that allow it as an everyday event, is complex, and this shows in Gurgeh’s reaction to it. Many would turn away from it; deny its existence to themselves, reject it. The Culture’s approach is different, in that it understands and faces the darker sides of humanity.

This does not mean that it condones, or even in many cases, allows violence to take place. But it does mean that it doesn’t look away from violence. And it acknowledges that sometimes violence is necessary — as when an entire benign civilisation comes under unprovoked attack from without.

The Player of Games is the second Culture novel, and textually, it shows. In my review of the first book in the series, Consider Phlebas, I noted that the book “sprawls”. I wrote:

“In any other popular science fiction writer’s arsenal, the novel would no doubt be seen as their masterpiece; its engrossing narration, the consideration to which its author gave the world he built in it and the characters he portrays would combine to make the book one of the greats.

However, read in the context of Banks’ other Culture novels, it is clear that when the author published Consider Phlebas, he was struggling with both the form of the novel itself, as well as the need to tell a finite story in the world of infinite complexity and interest that he imagined in the Culture.”

When writing The Player of Games, Banks was clearly much less ambitious than when he was putting Consider Phlebas together; and it shows. Although the book covers much less ground, it does it so much more successfully; its more limited scope allows it to shine clearly. Banks learnt much from Consider Phlebas.

The Player of Games’ messages are clearer, its limited set of characters more defined and its plotline more tightly woven. Hints are strewn throughout the book as to the ultimate motives and actions behind the set of events at the forefront of the narrative, but they are not obvious, and Banks does a great job of gradually revealing his story, without going too fast or too slowly.

Ultimately, because of its diminished scope, The Player of Games is not a masterpiece of science fiction; not even a flawed masterpiece like Consider Phlebas. But what it is is an absolute classic of the genre that every sci-fi literature fan should pick up. It’s a triumph; it marks Banks’ coming of age as a science fiction master. It’s a solid gold nugget of enjoyable goodness which will remain in your memory for years to come.

And also — critically, given the complexity of the narrative of some of the other Culture books — it represents an ideal introduction into this ambitious vision of the future of humanity. Read this (or perhaps the later novel Look to Windward) first, before you experience the rest of the Culture series. It’s a fantastic set-up for the bigger Culture universe out there. And it’s a thought-provoking window into humanity’s future soul.

The Way of Kings is the first book in an ambitious new ten-book fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive, by established fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. And what an opener this is.

Anyone who has even a cursory interest in fantasy literature can’t have missed Sanderson’s entrance into the scene over the past half-decade. After breaking into the scene with the stand-alone novel Elantris in 2005, Sanderson went on to publish the three-book Mistborn series.

I wrote of that series after finishing it that it was one of modern fantasy’s best trilogies. And I felt at the time that it highlighted one of Sanderson’s strongest traits as a writer: His ability to plan. When you finish the final Mistborn book, you walk away stunned that Sanderson had referred to and explained events right in the first pages of the first book in the series in the closing chapter of the third.

It is also this ability to plan that Sanderson has brought to his other major fantasy initiative to date: Finishing Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, following the author’s untimely death prior to its conclusion.

It’s hard to imagine a more sprawling and complex fantasy series than the Wheel of Time – or a more accessible one. Fantasy fans commonly compare reading the series to being addicted to crack cocaine. But as I wrote in my review of Sanderson’s first step in completing the series, The Gathering Storm, Sanderson’s planning and writing skills are up to the task of giving fans a satisfactory closure to Jordan’s masterpiece.

I mention all of this to help a reader to understand what they are picking up when they buy The Way of Kings.

This book is nothing less than Sanderson’s first step in attempting to equal Jordan’s masterpiece The Wheel of Time. With The Stormlight Archive, Sanderson is taking his first, masterly step into a journey that will likely take him more than a decade to complete and will see his name listed alongside Jordan, Tolkien, George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb in the pantheon of fantasy greats.

Yes, this book is that good.

In The Way of Kings, Sanderson is taking the planning and writing skills he polished through the Mistborn and Wheel of Time series and applying them to a stunning new and massive canvas.

The Way of Kings primarily follows three characters.

The first is a mysterious young warrior named Kaladin, who gave up a promising career as a surgeon to join the military in search of honour and glory. But his vision does not come to pass, and he passes into slavery, fighting every day for the right to survive.

The second is a man on the opposite end of life’s scales. Dalinar Kholin is a ‘brightlord’ – one of the rulers of the kingdom of Alethkar, and the commander of a brother army to the one in which Kaladin finds himself enslaved.

The third main character is Shallan, a young woman with remarkable drawing skills who successfully apprentices herself to one of the most renowned scholars of the land. But although she does truly enjoy her studies, Shallan has another underlying motive in mind for getting close to this scholar – one on which the fate of her family rests.

The world in which the stories of these three – and many, many other characters – take place, is a complex one. It is a world in which magic abounds, but as in Mistborn, it is magic that has more than a hint of the technological about it. Magic that has rules and systems governing its operation.

Sanderson’s world is also one in which – as in Mistborn – the past is enshrouded in mystery. Nobody is quite sure what or who the mysterious Knights Radiant were, but their relics – magic swords and armour – continue to be used by modern day people. And rumours of a faceless evil banished in the past continue to haunt and inform the present.

Storms shake the land, and there are daily reminders in The Way of Kings that the world it describes is not Earth. There are tiny magical beings everywhere – dubbed ‘Spren’, arising whenever certain emotions or energies are felt. Gloryspren, for example, manifest as golden lines springing up around someone who has just won a great battle. And Windspren flow around with the wind and play tricks on people.

If it seems already as if there are more than a few shadows of the ideas that Sanderson explored in Mistborn present in The Way of Kings, that’s because there definitely are.

Sanderson’s new series shares much structurally with his old one. The author loves mysteries, and at the heart of his storytelling ability is his habit of gradually revealing the meaning behind tiny details in his world. The experienced fantasy reader can pick up the hints he leaves littered throughout his work as to the true nature of everything in his world – and look forward to the inevitable stunning revelations Sanderson doles out like clockwork.

The magic system in The Way of Kings is similar to that of Mistborn, as is the combat. The mysterious past shaped by clataclysmic events, the true nature of which is not yet apparent, is also similar.

And yet all of these ideas are enhanced and magnified for the bigger stage of The Stormlight Archive. They are grander, and fill the heart and the head more than they did in the limited world of Mistborn.

Sanderson’s greatest problem, it is already apparent, will be the same one that Jordan experienced in The Wheel of Time. Sanderson will need to set boundaries around his world-building power, so that when he gets to book five or six of his mammoth series, his plot doesn’t become bogged down with the need to resolve dozens – nay, hundreds, in the Wheel of Time – of complex plot threads.

But we won’t need to worry about this for a while yet.

If there are criticisms of Sanderson’s work, they may be that The Way of Kings could be tighter. The book does seem to repeat some scenes that do not add much in the way of plot or character development; this is a problem for all three of Sanderson’s major characters.

There is also a sense that The Way of Kings is definitely an introductory volume in The Stormlight Archive series. Sanderson kicks off the book with a fast-paced action scene that introduces the reader to the fantastic magic system in his new world; but then spends most of the rest of the book avoiding such awesome displays of action and power.

And yet, it’s hard to criticize the author for doing so. Sanderson rightly needed to leave much to the future so that he could let the sense of anticipation grow throughout this first book and also through his series – he had to hold things back so that he could reveal them later on.

The best way to describe Sanderson’s work for a fantasy reader is to say that it is tremendously satisfying to read. You know what you’re in for and you feel comfortable resting in the hands of an absolute master.

By the time The Way of Kings is complete, much has been revealed about the world in which it takes place, and about its key characters. And yet, it is apparent that the book has only begun to sketch the outlines of a very complex and beautiful picture which will only be complete more than a decade hence.

I read The Way of Kings in a week – staying up late to do so. At almost exactly 1,000 pages it’s a massive tome – and yet I had to devour it all. After that week, however, I am now terribly conscious that I must wait another year, 18 months, or even more (panic!) for the next book to come out.

With some reviews of fantasy books, it is clear that the author has certain strengths that will appeal to certain readers but not others, so a critic such as myself can offer only a partial recommendation – or, more rarely, no recommendation at all.

With The Way of Kings this is not so. The Stormlight Archive is a series that, like Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings epics, every fantasy fan worth their salt must read and be familiar with. This will be one of the giant series that will help shape the entire scene. Take a week off work now and go and buy The Way of Kings. You won’t regret it.

Disclosure: The Way of Kings was sent to this author as a review copy by Sanderson’s publisher